About Sporkworld
About Sporkworld

 

Sporkworld is a collection of digital art and electronic writing which was started in 2000 by Millie Niss. In 2002, Martha Deed joined the Sporkworld team, and many works on Sporkworld are co-authored by Millie Niss and Martha Deed. There are also collaborations between Sporkworld and digital artists from around the world, including Unscenic Postcards, a collection of images with texts by 16 writers from three continents, and News from the Earthquake Zone with Regina Célia Pinto, a Brazilian Web Artist. More recently, Sporkworld added a Guest Artists section, which now has works by Edward Picot and Myron Turner.

Sporkworld has a growing list of companion sites in addition to the main digital art site, www.sporkworld.org (this site):

 

Sporkworld: The Community Community portal with announcements of web art and articles relating to the themes of Sporkworld. Article submissions, calls for participation, and announcements welcome.
Sporkworld Microblog Microblog featuring spontaneous images, videos, texts, and links by the Sporkworld team
Sporkworld Bookstore Store selling books, music, and gadgets recommended by Sporkworld
Martha Deed's Website Martha Deed's writing, photography, and web art

 

Millie Niss

 

Millie Niss is a web artist who has had interactive web installations published online in the United States, Brazil, the UK, and Scandinavia.  She is based in New York City and in North Tonawanda, NY.  Much of her work was done in collaboration with Martha Deed.  This site, Sporkworld, began as Millie's personal portfolio web site. In addition to the work on Sporkworld, Millie has many online publications. A selection of her videos (some in collaboration with Martha Deed), were shown at the Scope NY Art Fair in 2006.  Her visual art (in both hardcopy and computer formats) has been shown in several gallery shows and her non-digital poetry and nonfiction has been widely published on and offline. 

By both avocation and vocation, Millie occasionally does computer consulting and web design for nonprofit and small commercial clients.

Millie graduated from Columbia College in New York City with a BA in Mathematics, magna cum laude in 1993. She took computer science courses while at college for four semesters. After graduating, she attended a math Ph.D. program at Brown University for two years before deciding to change fields and to pursue her writing and art. While at Brown, she served as Departmental Computer Coordinator, a job which involved Unix systems administration and maintaining a network of HP workstations and Macintosh computers.  This was when the World Wide Web was first coming into prominence, and Millie installed the Brown University Math Department's first http server.

Millie also completed one half (the good half :-) of an MFA in Writing and Publishing from Emerson College in Boston.

 

Martha Deed

 

Martha Deed, the Sporkworld team member about whom this About is about, is on her third or fourth career -- or her 20th -- depending upon how one counts.  A practicing Psychologist who wrote for professional and lay publications for more than 30 years, she quit the "psychologist" part in 2001 to write and create web-based projects.

At the same time, she moved to a house on the Erie Canal, which is surrounded by animal and plant habitats that beg documentation.  The house itself, in North Tonawanda, NY, develops episodic disasters which trigger poems and web.art.

Many of these poems and multi-media installations have been published, and they are linked to her website.

In addition, Martha has published several short videos, including a series which roughly conforms to the seasons in Western New York State: Winter, Summer, Winter, Winter.

Her work has appeared in many print and online journals as well as in gallery shows including Scope 2006 with Sporkworld's creator, Millie Niss, her favorite collaborator.  Her chapbooks have been published by Peter Ganick's small chapbook project (2006) and Furniture Press (2004).  Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, including those published by Iowa Press and Red Hen.

Martha attended Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota) and obtained her BA from The New School (New York City).  She was awarded a Ph.D. from Boston University and retired from academic life until becoming a non-tenured faculty member of the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School thirty years later.  Aside from her private practice and writing, she participated in psychology association governance and task forces on the local, state, and national level, spending much of her time working with others to stem the erosion of adequate services to mentally-ill consumers and their families.
Psychology Vita